By the late 1980s, the personnel problems of the 'all volunteer' force had been turned upside down. (The Air Force itself had rarely drafted members, but had got many voluntary enlistments from those seeking to avoid the Army.) In 1989, it was reported that 99.8 per cent of the enlisted force had a high school diploma, the best record in USAF history. The United States, which once relied on a 'citizen army', had created a separate society in which its military volunteers were relatively free of drugs, of violence and of discrimination on the basis of race or gender. Women, who had been integrated into the service after dismantling of the separate Women's Air Force (WAF) in the 1970s, now made up 16 per cent of Air Force personnel.

At the end of the 1980s, the US Air Force was no longer representative of the population it served—no longer did any rich man's son or daughter have to serve—but it was the best-trained, best-educated, and in most respects the best-equipped force the United States had ever fielded. Its development of stealth technology had not been matched by the Soviets, who had done early research on evading radar but, for some reason, had not proceeded farther. Nor, for that matter, had the Soviets proceeded with their equivalent of the B-1B bomber, the Tupolev Tu-160 'Blackjack', beyond a handful of flying examples. Dissent was growing inside the USSR, the Russians had taken a beating all their own in Afghanistan, and their troops in general no longer measured up. When a MiG-29 pilot defected to the West in 1988, he reported widespread problems and conflict inside his air force.

The US Air Force had the people, the equipment. Almost no one had noticed that some of its members joined up because it was a good job or a way to get a good education. Desert One and Grenada did not linger in the public consciousness, and few who wore the BDUs (battle dress utilities) of the latter-day Air Force seriously believed they might, soon, be asked to fight, bleed and die. None could have predicted, not in their wildest dreams, that the place for it to happen was Iraq.